Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Discussions and negotiations on these rules or other matters are constantly under way.

On capital expenditure, the one area of caution we need to be aware of is that as money becomes available to our economy, we need to make sure that we release it back into our economy in a way that is genuinely sustainable for everybody. I will give the Senator an example of what I mean by that before we make any further changes regarding the availability of capital. He knows that my view is that we need to increase capital expenditure in certain areas, but if I look at what we currently have, with no further change, in 2018 we will be spending 47% more in capital expenditure than we spent in 2014. That would be an increase of €1.7 billion. In 2019, with no further change in our policy stance, we will spend €800 million more than we were planning to do in 2018. We have to ensure that as we release and put in investment into our economy, it turns into investment as opposed to what happened in the past, which is that we released large amounts of capital into our economy. That had two effects. It drove up the price for projects we wanted to build and it was one of the triggers of the huge difficulties all of us got into. They are "watch outs" that will be available to me at all times.